4 comments

i haven't kept score in years.
when i was pretty young and watched cubs games on wgn on summer afternoons, steve stone would say stuff like "that's a 3-6-3 for those of you scoring at home." i found that really interesting and asked my mom what it meant. as she didn't grow up in the us with baseball, she wasn't sure, but she found out about keeping score and bought a scorebook from the local sporting goods store and we learned how to keep score. i practiced by keeping score of mostly cubs games and then sometimes the national broadcast on saturdays.
when i was in middle school i earned money keeping score for the softball games for the girls younger than me.
i don't think i have kept score since then - but i used to love it.

I've been keeping score for 15 years, and I love it. My style is a combination of the way my father taught me and little things I've added through the years, and almost completely illegible. I look through my little book every once in a while and can't make heads or tails of what happened. But I still love it. I've taught my sister, cousins and other friends, and many of them still score.

One of my favorite stories was the Luis Castillo game. I was (of course) scoring, and when A-Rod popped it up, I threw my head back and then looked down at the book to start writing "4". I never got that far, because my father started screaming. But I was at that game and never saw him drop the ball because I score it.

Loved the article though Alex, its very similar to how I score. I use a Washington Nationals Bob Carpenter scorebook (http://www.bcscorebook.com/) which is a throwback to my time in DC, and I do score at every game I go to, but I write little notes to myself and scribble and such. And I always write the gametime weather. I have no idea why.